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Vert.x heading for Eclipse Foundation - Update

The future home of Vert.x will most likely be at the Eclipse Foundation. Project leader Tim Fox recommended that the JVM-polyglot asynchronous event-driven framework should look to the Eclipse Foundation as a "little more 'business friendly'" home for the project's assets and governance. Mike Millinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, welcomed Fox's recommendation. A call for a +1/-1 vote from the original Vert.x community, seems so far to be predominantly +1, with no serious objections.

The future of Vert.x became the subject of debate earlier this month when Fox, who recently left VMware to take up a position at Red Hat, revealed that VMware lawyers turned up at his door demanding that he give up control of the Vert.x domain, discussion groups and issue trackers. The project had been developed at VMware and effectively sponsored by them, but Fox had not expected that reaction. Discussions with VMware and Fox's new employer Red Hat saw the assets turned over to VMware's control and another discussion begin over the future of Vert.x in general.

Fox's recommendation was also positively received by Red Hat's Mark Little, but the community discussion is still ongoing and VMware, as of writing, has not made any commitment.

The Eclipse Foundation will need to make a number of exceptions to bring Vert.x on board; most importantly allowing an exception to the rule that all Eclipse projects are under the Eclipse Public Licence. Vert.x is Apache licensed and it is unlikely that the developers will want to switch from a permissive to an albeit weakly copylefted licence. VMware will also need to transfer over its trademark assets to Eclipse and the project will have to sort out whether GitHub or Eclipse's Git is where its source code repository resides.

Although the Apache Foundation was in the running as a possible home, Simon Phipps points out that as well as differences in formulation (Apache is a public-benefit non-profit, Eclipse a member-benefit non-profit), Eclipse also allows businesses to formally participate in its processes whereas Apache only allows individual contributors to participate.

Update 22/01/13: It is now confirmed that Vert.x is moving to the Eclipse Foundation. Tim Fox tweeted that the process had begun and the Eclipse Foundation's Mike Millinkovich has begun helping shepherd the project into the Foundation. VMware's Alexis Richardson agreed earlier today to the transferal of Vert.x to the Foundation, the last hurdle to clear before the process could begin.